Probably the best thing to ever happen to one little town in Virginia was when they hired Dr. Goodwin as rector of Bouton Parish Church in 1903. 

            One of  the good revered favorite pastimes was to take walks of an evening.  And it was on one of those walks that he started to get an idea.  Maybe it was because of his strong religious convictions, but  you see, Dr. Goodwin was a man who believed in what you couldn’t see.  And he swore that when he walked those streets of a night, he could sense the presence of the people who had lived there before.  “They were glad and gallant ghosts,” he swore, “companions of the silent hour of reverie.” 

            Over the years, the reverend grew to love that quiet, country town.  Years before, it had been the center of Virginia government, until 1780 when the state capitol finally moved to Richmond.  And it became a dream of the Reverend Goodwin to see that town like it must have been in its glory days, when it was the center of the thriving Virginia colony.   

            But most of the citizens just thought it a pipe dream of an aging man.  For 20 years, Dr. Goodwin preached about his idea.  But not much came of it until he talked John D. Rockefeller, Jr., into buying an old farmhouse in a town called Basset Hall. 

            I guess you could say that was the second best thing to happen to this little town because Mr. Rockefeller caught the same fever that had so long afflicted Dr. Goodwin.  And as one of the richest men in America, he had considerable resources to get his dreams off the ground.  I guess we have a lot to thank those men for, because from all their dreaming and scheming we now have a historical land site that encompasses an entire town.  And Williamsburg, Virginia, now that’s quite a place.

            But if the truth were told, Williamsburg is more of a reconstruction than it is a restoration.  Oh sure, a few 18th-century buildings and home sites still stood during Dr. Goodwin’s time, at least partially.  But many of them were in ruins, some so neglected that only traces of an original foundation could be found. 

            It’s no wonder.  A good number of those early buildings had burnt to the ground at one time or another.  Think about it.  Before electricity, open fires lit people’s homes and gave them heat.  So it was that fire destroyed the majority of the early building sites that populated our colonial towns in the east. 

            In fact, if you wanted to visit the oldest building in America, you wouldn’t find it anywhere on the east coast, or in any of the original 13 colonies.  No.  You have to go a lot further west than that because It’s a Little Known Fact that the oldest building in America stands in one of the last states to be added to the Union, New Mexico, where early Spanish settlers built the “Palace of the Governors” in Santa Fe way back in 1610.